Saturday, August 15, 2009

Week 2 (Part 2)

I am working my way through the work, and trying to identify what there is to do on the course. I have been listening to the recording of the online session. It is difficult to keep a sense of community when you have individual posting scattered on blogs. It will be much easier to use an online group (Yahoo group? Google groups?). This would allow to share information much more easily with other course participants . This could act as a central meeting point. May be I am missing something.

Just another thought about when a group becomes a community. Isn't it that a group becomes a community once participants are starting to know each other better, leading to changes in the group dynamic?

I am a bit confused now. I thought that I was already late on the schedule, but I came to give feed back to other participants, I have noticed that I seem to be ahead… Strange. I am not used to that.

4 comments:

I would tend to agree with your comment that communities are when participants are more familiar and at ease with each other and that there is a sense of mutual participation. I suppose that is probably a key objective of the course, but I also wonder if that is achievable when you have some people being officially enrolled on the course whereas others are here because of interest or other such reasons. They may not necessarily participate as fully (although I know that may also be said of those that are officially enrolled).

I wondered the same thing about this course Rachel while I was writing my blog posting this week. It's all very well a group of people coming together for a purpose but for that group to be a community the group needs to participate together and become familiar with each other, otherwise they are just a group of like-minded individuals. From the outset I have had trouble working out who is enrolled in the course so I can follow their blogs and who is hee for personal interest (and may not be posting weekly to blogs etc).

Yes absolutely, it is important to connect with people you learn from but with formal and informal groups members , the hardest part is working out who that might be (especially in large gatherings) and making contact with those people. :)